The Pleasure at Being the Cause is a two-day workshop led by artist and choreographer Nikima Jagudajev, currently in residence at Scuola Piccola Zattere. The workshop proposes an interdisciplinary approach to artistic practice developed through game structures and worldbuilding. Its aim is to support artists in exploring and expanding their creative processes through play, both practically and theoretically.
Each participant will develop a spatial and/or embodied game instigated by a mythopoeic object — an object loaded with imaginative potential and narrative meaning. Through readings and theoretical discussions, simple movement practices, and engagement with eachothers’ creative processes— as observers, critics, and players — we will explore the elements that compose a game structure: rules, duration, space, stakes, and the roles of the actors involved. Together, we will examine how these dynamics relate to the institutional and artistic contexts we inhabit. A central theme will be contextualizing the act of composition within the white supremacist history of the white cube, considering how game structures can mess with that lineage.
Jagudajev’s methodology in the workshop is intentionally “messy”: a way to incorporate contingency as a player who is involved in the making and remaking of the game. Performance-based work offers another way of orienting ourselves in a white cube, a different way of relating to art, not as something that we are separate from but as an integrative, uncontrollable and spontaneous practice of being together, one that is open to contamination. 

RE-SCHOOLING
The title of the workshop, The Pleasure at Being the Cause, is a phrase coined by German psychologist Karl Groos as a way of describing the moment a child first discovers their capacity to affect the world. When a baby waves their arms or shakes their head and the adult imitates them, the child lights up—they understand their immediate impact. Simple yet fundamental joy, the pleasure at being the cause.
As anarchist anthropologist David Graeber has pointed out, this experience is often suppressed in adulthood by alienating systems of labor. Play, as an ordered activity that has its end within itself, is a starting point for Jagudajev’s artistic practice which they call re-schooling. This process-based, collaborative practice draws inspiration from spontaneous forms of play that emerge in school settings: self-organized play, gossiping, flirting, passing notes. These informal, self-organized acts—outside the formal curriculum—are moments of genuine creativity and connection. Re-schooling requires the input of many collaborators, sharing with one another their most impassioned selves, sewing relational threads, building strong bonds with themselves and others.

PROGRAM
The workshop is free and will take place on June 26 and 27, from 11.00 am to 6.00 pm at Scuola Piccola Zattere (Fondamenta Zattere al Ponte Longo, Dorsoduro 1401).